Finding the "Old Villages"

Kindly note: Precise archaeological site locations have been obscured, to protect the heritage of the Quinhagak community. All photos and videos were taken by the author, unless otherwise stated.

Landscape Archaeology for Native Descendent Communities in the Y-K Delta: A New Way Forward

My name is Jonathan Lim, and I am a DPhil student in Archaeology at the University of Oxford! My research involves the development of a new protocol for investigating the cultural landscapes of the Yup’ik people in Southwest Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Delta. My work is built on the acknowledgement that conventional archaeological techniques in the Y-K Delta is insufficient by themselves for fully understanding the rich cultural complexity of these landscapes. Working alongside the local community and the University of Aberdeen’s Quinhagak Archaeological Project, I will be deploying ethnographic techniques in tandem with spatial technology to understand how the past and present Yup’iit of the Quinhagak region lived their lives here. Using an early iteration of this technique in 2019, we identified dozens of cultural places of importance to the Quinhagak people.

The next element of the research framework will utilise remote sensing techniques to corroborate assertions made by the interviewees about the landscape. It works on the notion that the vegetation on archaeological sites in the Y-K Delta is often different from the surrounding tundra— human activity, like waste disposal and food processing, enriches the soil in this nutrient-poor environment, making it conducive to the growth of certain species of plants. 

In order to quantify this data, I will be taking aerial photographs of the sites and the surrounding landscape with a drone mounted with a specialised camera. This device captures light in the visible, Near-IR and Red Edge spectra of light, allowing me to highlight vegetation changes through the calculation of vegetation indices like NDVI and RENDVI. Multispectral satellite imagery may also be used for areas not accessible by the drone. I will attempt to determine if different types of sites (for example, hunting camps vs winter villages) have contrasting vegetation patterns, which may reveal how they were used by past Yup’iit. Eventually, this may lead to an algorithm to automatically locate unrecorded archaeological sites in the landscape and monitor known sites, giving local communities in the Y-K Delta a powerful new tool for managing their heritage in the face of modern challenges like rapid climate change and territorial litigation.

This is a logistically complex and ambitious undertaking that will likely take some years to complete. However, we are not alone in this endeavour. I am profoundly grateful to have recently received an Emslie Horniman Scholarship from the Royal Anthropological Institute, as well as a Heritage Seed Fund grant from the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). Furthermore, I have received Meyerstein Award grants from the School of Archaeology for field equipment, and my initial 2019 exploratory field season was fully funded by the Keble Association. The generous support of these organizations means that we now have the resources to carry out this project in a manner that does justice to the wonderful and resilient people of Quinhagak.

Quyana (thank you) for your interest in my research! I am always happy to discuss my work, and can be contacted at  jonathan.lim@ arch.ox.ac.uk . Please do peruse the following links to learn more about the ongoing heritage efforts at Quinhagak:

1. A 2017 National Geographic article on the Nunalleq site:  https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/04/artifact-melt-alaska-archaeology-climate-change/ 
2. Children of the Dig, an award-winning short film on the Nunalleq site and Quinhagak by Joshua Branstetter (Branstetter Films):  https://vimeo.com/channels/branstetter/284313360 
3. The University of Aberdeen's Quinhagak Archaeological Project blog:  https://nunalleq.wordpress.com/ 
4. Hillerdal, C., Knecht, R. and Jones, W., 2019. Nunalleq: Archaeology, Climate Change, and Community Engagement in a Yup’ik Village. Arctic Anthropology, 56(1), pp.4-17.  https://doi.org/10.3368/aa.56.1.4